Sunday, January 31, 2016

We often compare today’s student radicals to the Red Guards
who terrorized and nearly destroyed China between 1966 and 1976. When it comes
to student radicals the Red Guards are the gold standard: the most violent, the
most empowered, the most depraved. After all, the did not just humiliate their
teachers. They murdered them and sometimes even ate their remains.

When it was happening, no one outside of China really knew what was happening
during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

When Richard Nixon traveled to China in 1972 the American press was presenting a rather positive view of the Cultural Revolution. In
France, radical students, more sophisticated and more hard line than their
American counterparts, took up the Maoist cause and tried to foment cultural revolution
in their nation.

And yet, Zha Jianying reminds us in his review of Ji Xianlin’s
account of his experiences as a persecuted professor during the Cultural
Revolution, we still know very little about the sufferings that were visited on Chinese
teachers and intellectuals at that time. Since Ji's book is a first person account, it
does not seem to address the experience of the government bureaucrats who were also
targeted.

For those who wish a different take, author Jung Chang recounts
the lives of three generations of Chinese women, up to and including the
experience of the Cultural Revolution in her book Wild Swans.

Ji Xianlin’s book matters because it provides us with a
picture of what the student revolutionaries did to their teachers, goaded by
Mao and his actress wife, Jiang Qing.

We know, or ought to know, that Mao launched the Cultural
Revolution in order to shift the blame for the famine that killed around
35,000,000 people in the early 1960s. After the famine, two Chinese leaders,
Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping tried to wrest party control from Mao. They wanted
to reform the economy by bringing in capitalist reforms.

When it seemed that they were about to succeed Mao rallied
disaffected students and told them to direct their anger at the
intellectual classes, teachers and party bureaucrats. Liu and Deng were
declared the number 1 and number 2 capitalist roaders. As you know Liu was
murdered by the Red Guards and Deng survived, largely because he was protected
by senior military officers.

Mao blamed the Great Famine on counterrevolutionaries in the
government and on the intellectual classes. Since he was infallible, his policy could not have been the problem. The problem lay in the way it had been implemented and in the mindset
that allowed people to believe that they could exercise freedom.

They were, by his thought, too attached to Confucian
thought, with its emphasis on the practice of propriety and the exercise of
discretion. During the Cultural Revolution the only book that anyone was
permitted to read was the little red book of the sayings of Mao. All other
books were banned. It was the most ambitious effort at mass brainwashing the
world has ever seen.

Mao hated Confucianism for the same reason that earlier
emperors had burned the writings of the great sage. Confucius was willing to
rely on people’s moral sense, their sense of shame, their sense of propriety
and decency. He did not want to regulate their behavior by giving them orders. Mao wanted people to obey his dictates to the letter, roughly as
earlier emperors had imposed legalistic restraints on their orders.

Mao’s Communist Party had always been interested in brainwashing
or thought reform. They must have believed that if they could control minds
they could control behavior. For an extensive study, see Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of
Totalism.

Chinese intellectuals were often happy to go along to get along.

Zha Jianying explains it in his review:

Under
the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), mass mobilization and political
campaigns became a national way of life and no one was allowed to be a
bystander, least of all the intellectuals, a favorite target in Mao’s periodic
thought-reform campaigns. Feeling guilty about his previous passivity, Ji
eagerly reformed himself. He joined the Party in the 1950s and actively
participated in the ceaseless campaigns, which had a common trait: conformity
and intolerance of dissent. In the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement, more than half
a million intellectuals were denounced and persecuted, even though most of
their criticisms were very mild and nearly all were Party loyalists.

Ji was teaching at Peking University in 1966 when Mao
proclaimed the Cultural Revolution.

Zha describes the scene:

In
fact, he was doing just that in the first year of the Cultural Revolution.
Peking University was quickly transformed into a chaotic zoo of factional
battles, with frantic mobs rushing about attacking professors and school
officials labeled as capitalist-roaders-in-power.

The
long, screaming rallies where Ji, already in his late fifties, and other
victims were savagely beaten, spat on, and tortured. The betrayal by his former
students and colleagues. An excruciating episode in the labor camp: Ji’s body
collapsed under the strain of continuous struggle sessions; his testicles
became so swollen he couldn’t stand up or close his legs. But the guard forced
him to continue his labor, so he crawled around all day moving bricks. When he
was finally allowed to visit a nearby military clinic, he had to crawl on a
road for two hours to reach it, only to be refused treatment the moment the
doctor learned he was a black guard. He crawled back to the labor camp.

Intellectuals and bureaucrats were subjected to public
humiliation sentences and then punished by being sent to labor camps. In one
sense, it was also a cultural reform. If you want to cure people of the
proprieties and decorum of shame culture, if you want them to overcome the
strict barrier that exists there between public and private… you can begin by
subjecting them to public humiliation, to show them at their worst in public,
to force them to expose themselves, to the point where they experience
something roughly equivalent to a gang rape. At that point they come to believe that they have no self-respect, they have no face, they have nothing left to hide. Thus, they have no need to manifest good behavior
in public or to try to behave decorously and with civility. They will then replace
behaviors that contribute to social harmony with behaviors that involve them in
a permanent struggle and permanent drama.

Intellectuals are not notoriously courageous. They wilt
under stress. The extreme stress caused many of the intellectuals to turn
against each other, to denounce and betray each other in order to show that
they were true believing Maoists:

He
writes about Chinese intellectuals’ eager cooperation in ideological campaigns
and how, under pressure, they frequently turned on one another.

As Ji wrote:

Since we had been directed to oppose the
rightists, we did. After more than a decade of continuous political struggle,
the intellectuals knew the drill. We all took turns persecuting each other.
This went on until the Socialist Education Movement, which, in my view, was a
precursor to the Cultural Revolution.

In effect, they were being
acculturated in guilt. In a shame culture one is duty bound to show respect for
others. In a guilt culture one is duty bound to punish oneself for one’s
crimes, real or imagined. In China these were invariably thought crimes.

He writes:

To Ji,
this is a forgivable sin because if he and many other Chinese intellectuals
have been guilty of persecuting one another, it was largely because the
intellectuals as a class had been compelled to feel deeply guilty and shameful
about themselves. Ji described how this was achieved through the fierce
criticism and self-criticism sessions, a unique feature of the Maoist
thought-reform campaigns. Ji’s own ideological conversion was accomplished
through such a ritual.

As Zha describes it, the sense of guilt effectively replaced
a belief that they had nothing left to hide, and had no reason to maintain
their sense of shame. Thus, they were acculturated in guilt and self-punishment:

Ji
describes the overwhelming sense of guilt as “almost Christian,” which led to a
feeling of shame and induced a powerful urge to conform and to worship the new
God—the Communist Party and its Great Leader. Afterward, like a sinner given a
chance to prove his worthiness, he eagerly abandoned all his previous
skepticism—the trademark of a critical faculty—and became a true believer. He
embraced the new cult of personality, joining others to shout at the top of his
voice “Long Live Chairman Mao!” Through this process, millions of Chinese
intellectuals cast off their individuality. For Ji, the feeling of guilt became
so deeply engrained that, even after he was locked up in the cowshed, he racked
his brain for his own faults rather than questioning the Party or the system.

Zha’s analysis of the Cultural Revolution differs somewhat
from mind. Thus, it is worth examining:

Everyone
knows that Mao is the chief culprit of the Cultural Revolution. Well-known
historical data points to a tangle of factors behind Mao’s motivation for
launching it: subtle tension among the top leadership of the CCP since the
Great Leap Forward, which led to a famine with an estimated thirty to forty
million deaths; his desire to reassert supremacy and crush any perceived
challenge to his personal power by reaching down directly to the masses; his
radical, increasingly lunatic vision of permanent revolution; his deep
anti-intellectualism and paranoid jealousy. But, from the viewpoint of the
Party, allowing a full investigation and exposure of Mao’s manipulations would
threaten the Party’s legitimacy. If the great helmsman gets debunked, the whole
ship may go down. Mao as a symbol is therefore crucial: it is tied to the
survival of the Party state.

Zha raises an important issue here. Even after the leaders
of the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four, were arrested in 1976 there was
little national soul-searching and little public analysis of the events.

One reason might have been that so many people participated:

Then
there is the thorny issue of the people’s participation in the Cultural
Revolution. The Red Guards were only the best-known of the radical
organizations. At the height of madness, millions of ordinary Chinese took part
in various forms of lawless actions and rampant violence. The estimated death
toll of those who committed suicide, were tortured to death, were publicly
executed, or were killed in armed factional battles runs from hundreds of
thousands to millions. This makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to
bring all of the perpetrators to account.

Surely, this is a primary reason. The second reason was if
you want to restore people’s sense of shame you should begin by covering up. When
you get caught with your pants down, even when your pants have been pulled down
against your will, the first thing you to do take a step toward having a sense
of shame is to pull them up. The powers in China did not believe that anything
would be gained by a protracted soul-searching into the causes of the Cultural
Revolution. Nor did they seem to believe that those who were victimized by it
would be served by reliving its horrors.

Zha recounts that Ji became an active supporter of the
student protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989. Surely, this was an act of
political courage. But, Zha does not mention an important point, namely, that whereas
we in the West saw the protests as the second coming of Woodstock, the men who
were leading China at the time were more likely to have seen the students as
the second coming of the Red Guards.

If one does not understand what the protests looked like
within the context of recent Chinese history one will never understand what
happened, why it happened, and why it did not cause the people to overthrow the regime.

How can we stop the long march of political correctness on
college campuses? How can we put an end to the nonsense about trigger warnings
and microaggressions? How can we shut down the policing of thought and speech
that now infects so many college campuses? ? How can we overcome the absurdity
of college students being told that if they will be downgraded if they use
correct English grammar?

What can be done about colleges who spend their time
worrying about whether men can use women’s locker rooms? What can be done about
college teachers who have no compunction about indoctrinating their students in
the ideology of oppression and white privilege? And what can be done about the advent of
administrative proceedings—instigated by the Obama administration—to deprive those accused of sexual assault of due process of law?

Recently, a group of radicals at Oriel College in Oxford
University decided that a statue of Cecil Rhodes, a man whose money had funded
the college, had to be taken down. The movement was called Rhodes Must Fall. You
see, Rhodes was a racist, and therefore his statuesque presence was preventing
black students from realizing their full potential.

Well, the college just decided to reject the demands of the
disaffected students, a decision that ought to shame a certain number of
American college presidents, beginning with Peter Salovey at Yale. You recall that Salovey could do no better than to cave in to radical student demands.

By way of contrast, the chancellor of Oxford University,
Lord Chris Patten told the protesters that if they did not like the statue they
should go get their educations elsewhere.

Why did those who run Oriel College at Oxford decide to keep
the statue? Why did they decide to cease their consultations with the Rhodes
Must Fall group?

The answer is: college alumni began to withdraw their
financial donations. The college depends on these donations to balance its books. How about that? With money goes power. For all the
spirited debate that takes place in the marketplace of ideas, what really
matters in venerable Oxford University is alumni donations. Call it the power
of the purse.

Many years ago Irving Kristol suggested that the people who
have the power to tamp down on political correctness and other forms of leftist
radicalism are the alumni who shower these places with money. And, let’s not
forget the state legislatures who fund many of the state run institutions.

Since an alumni donation is freely given, it can be freely
withdrawn. It’s very easy to change one’s will to write out one’s favorite
college.

You might call it a return to rationality, but you might better follow Glenn Reynolds and say that it’s a return to “adult supervision.”

In any event, the Daily Telegraph reported on the price
Oriel College paid for even considering removing the Rhodes statue:

The
governing body of Oriel College, which owns the statue, has ruled out
its removal after being warned that £1.5m worth of donations have already been
cancelled, and that it faces dire financial consequences if it bows to the
Rhodes Must Fall student campaign.

A
leaked copy of a report prepared for the governors and seen by this newspaper
discloses that wealthy alumni angered by the “shame and embarrassment” brought
on the 690-year-old college by its own actions have now written it out of their
wills.

The
college now fears a proposed £100m gift - to be left in the will of
one donor - is now in jeopardy following the row.

The
donors were astonished by a proposal to remove a plaque marking where Rhodes
lived, and to launch a six-month consultation over whether the statue of the
college’s biggest benefactor should be taken down.

But Oriel College confirmed in a statement to
the Telegraph: “Following careful consideration, the College’s governing body
has decided that the statue should remain in place.”

And also,

At a
meeting on Wednesday the governing body was told that because of its ambiguous
position on the removal of the statue, “at least one major donation of
£500,000” that was expected this year has been cancelled.

In
addition, a “potential £750,000 donor” has stopped responding to messages from
the college, and several alumni have written to Oriel to say “they are
disinheriting the college from their wills”.

Finally,

One of
those who has already cancelled their legacy was going to leave a “seven figure
sum” and the college is aware that “another major donor is furious with the
College… whose legacy could be in excess of £100m”.

The
report warns that there will now "almost certainly" be "one or
two redundancies" in its Development Office team because of the collapse
in donations. And it has cancelled an annual fundraising drive that should have
taken place in April. The report also warns that Oriel's development office
could now make an operating loss of around £200,000 this year.

So, if you want to assign blame for the lunacy that is
currently infecting so many of America’s best college campuses, don’t forget to
point a finger at the alumni whose generous donations are funding it. The power
lies with the purse.

Now that the Trumpless debate has come and gone, everyone is
still agonizing over whether the Donald made a bold strategic move or made
himself look weak. The answer, I would underscore, will be found in the outcome
of the primaries and the general election. If you think you know the answer before the fact, you don’t. No one does. If you think that Trump is always right
and can do no wrong, you are an idolater.

Aside from that excessively salient point, there is another question
that no one is asking. Why are the Democratic candidates afraid to do a debate
on Fox? Are they terrified at the prospect of facing the fearsome Megyn Kelly
or does Bret Baier cause them to quiver in their boots or booties?

Writing in The Australian Douglas Murray outlines the crisis
that is currently destroying the European Union. For another angle, see this
story by Barbie Latza Nadeau in the Daily Beast.

Murray explains that it all began with a spasm of motherly
compassion accompanied by deep feelings of guilt.

When
the body of a young Syrian boy was found washed up on a beach in Turkey last
year, many Europeans were strangely bounced into thinking that this was both
Europe’s fault and its responsibility.

Leftist Europeans thought they were being presented with a
great moral opportunity, that is, a chance to show the world their moral
superiority. It tells us to be wary of people who ostentatiously claim the moral high ground:

For
parts of Europe the human tidal wave appeared to present a kind of moral
opportunity. The Swedish government boasted of becoming a “humanitarian
superpower”. “Mutti” (mother) Merkel — to give her the name Germans often used
to accord her — presented the desire of ­refugees to actually come into
Germany, rather than flee from it, as something of a historical atonement.

Those who were in the throes of this moral spasm came up
with some seemingly cogent arguments in favor of immigration. These new
immigrants, they argued, would be Germany’s future workforce:

Her
government also disingenuously and short-sightedly echoed some free-marketeers
who suggested that this tsunami of mainly young people could assist the
“greying” German population by providing the labour force for the next
generation. Never mind that this “labour force” had no jobs to go to or that
they were moving through southern European countries such as Italy and Greece,
which themselves had between 25 per cent and 50 per cent youth unemployment
rates.

Being great humanitarians and believing that all cultures
are the same these German politicians followed the appalling example of their
Swedish neighbors and ignored the possibility that Muslim immigrants might not
be able to assimilate and might not possess the skills that would make them
valuable workers:

This
argument also criminally foresaw no problems from importing a new working class
from a different continent with a different creed and different values. Cologne
helped reverse that lack of foresight. But there is some unravelling to do yet.

When it comes to workforce participation the reality looks
quite different. Today in Germany, the newspaper Die Weltreports, the unemployment rate is around 7%. The
unemployment rate for Syrian immigrants is 64%; that of Lebanese, 49%; that of
Iraqis, 43%; that of Afghanis, 31%. The jobs that the new immigrants do get
tend to be unskilled. Immigrants who have been in the country for a
long time do not do very much better.

And no one should have been surprised that the rampant
misogyny should be accompanied by a rising tide of anti-Semitism.

Crucially,
for the first time, Merkel looks weak and on the defensive. It was only after
allowing a million more migrants into the country — and as reports of anti-Semitic
incidents began to seep in — that the Chancellor said Germany did not want any
anti-Semites to come to Germany.

And it
was only after the horrors of New Year’s Eve that Merkel and her ministers
began to say that anyone who thought women were rape fodder was not welcome in
Germany.

Today 40% of Germans believe that Merkel should quit. For
now we have no reason to think that this is going to end well.

Friday, January 29, 2016

I first wrote about this in 2012. You would think that that
would have been enough time for the nation and its psycho professionals to get
it out of their minds. But, alas, it is continuing, and it is even becoming
something of a trend.

I am talking about self-marriage. Yes, indeed. If you are
having trouble finding a suitable mate, if dating has not been going very well,
if you are tired of the bar scene, the club scene and the hookup scene… well,
you can solve your problems by marrying yourself. Invite all your friends and
family and plight your troth to yourself.

How come no one thought of that before? Why haven’t people
been willing to declare to the world how much they love themselves? I do not
need to explain how you consummate your self-marriage, but you can guess.

According to Vice.com self-marriage is a way of boosting or
affirming your self-love. As though it needs boosting or affirming. No one else
might like you, but you like you. No one else might love you, but you love you.
No one else might want to sleep with you, but you are happy to shoulder the
burden, night after night… you never fail to be there for you.

Think of the advantages. You do not need to worry about
changing your name. Some of self-marriage’s proponents argue that you do not
have to have sex with the same person all the time. Pardon me for raising the
question, but if you have sex with yourself—Woody Allen once called it sex
with someone you love—aren’t you having sex with the same body every time? If
you hook up with someone at a club, aren’t you therefore cheating on yourself? Console
yourself with the thought that once you marry yourself you will not be arguing
about who is doing which chores.

Of course, when check in to a hotel should you say that you
are one or two? Do you file your taxes as single or married? What if you want
to go out but your self wants to stay home?

Proponents of self-marriage say that it’s better than being
alone. To make it seem slightly less ridiculous, they say that when you marry
yourself you are telling the world that you like your own company. Perfectly
independent and autonomous—isn’t that what everyone wants?-- you will not be
desperate to find someone to fill the gap in your life.

Proponents also say that it relieves the pressure to find
the One, because you are the One. Now when you don’t have a date for Saturday
night you really do have a date with yourself. You can pig out on chicken wings
and chips and no one will be the wiser. Perfect self-indulgence one might call
it.

Then again, what happens when you start talking to yourself?
Is it a real conversation or an ersatz psychotic breakdown? We know that in
psychiatry talking to yourself is not a very good sign.

But, when you marry yourself, can you still date? Proponents
of self-marriage will say that they do not cheat on themselves when they have
sex with someone else because they have an open relationship. They have agreed
with themselves that extramarital affairs will be fine. Some might call it polygamy.

But, won’t your auxiliary spouses be jealous of your extraordinary
love for yourself. And if you are completely self-sufficient and do not need
anyone for anything, what is their role? Are they just extra baggage, to be
used for subsidiary needs and then tossed aside in favor of the one true love
that will never leave you: your Self.

But then again, how can you want yourself, how can you yearn
for yourself, how can you desire yourself when there is no way of putting any
distance between you and yourself? If absence makes the heart grow fonder, or
some such thing, and if absence is the basis for desire—you cannot desire something
you already have—it makes no sense to say that you desire yourself, that you
will need to seduce yourself, that you will need to charm yourself.

If you are a woman and can figure out parthenogenesis, you
can even have children. As for divorce, some believe that the only way you can
dissolve this marriage by yourself is by committing suicide.

If you read some of the articles on this strange custom you
will discover that its leading practitioners seem all to be women. It’s hard to
believe that women are more full of themselves than men, but such seems to be
the case. Perhaps, it comes from feminist ideology and the therapy culture. The
self-married few see self-marriage as a way to escape patriarchal oppression
and commitments to other people.

If we had read this in The Onion, it would be good for a few
laughs. Just because we read it on Vice.com does not make it less satirical.
Some people seem to want to make themselves a living, breathing reductio ad absurdum of one of the main
trends in philosophy and psychology: the glorification of the Self, the
obsession with Self, the adoration of Self, the veneration of the Self. How
much psychotherapy is devoted to healing the Self, to repairing the Self?
Wouldn’t self-marriage be the logical goal of this process?

Of course, the mini-minds of the therapy world will tell you
that once you commit yourself to self-love and find a good, clean, healthy
self-love you will project your inner radiance and self-confidence. Others will immediately be attracted to you, because nothing is quite so attractive as someone who is full of hiimself. Thus
self-love by the theory will naturally lead to fulfilling love with another
person.

For those who like their theories pure and who refuse to
adulterate their serious thinking with any objective facts or realities,
self-marriage is clearly the way to go. For my part I liked it better when pride was a sin.

Professor Richard Dawkins has
had an invitation to speak at a science event withdrawn by organisers for
sharing a "highly offensive" video mocking feminists on
Twitter.

Dawkins
was scheduled to speak at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism
which will take place in New York City in May, but on Thursday organisers
issued a statement concerning his participation.

“The
NECSS has withdrawn its invitation to Richard Dawkins to participate at NECSS
2016. We have taken this action in response to Dr. Dawkins’ approving re-tweet
of a highly offensive video.

“We
believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom to express unpopular, and
even offensive, views. However, unnecessarily divisive, counterproductive, and
even hateful speech runs contrary to our mission and the environment we wish to
foster at NECSS. The sentiments expressed in the video do not represent the
values of NECSS or its sponsoring organisations.”

One cheers the organization’s ringing affirmation of free
speech. And yet, one is obliged to note that it is a completely meaningless…
when it is censoring Dawkins for retweeting—not quite the same as expressing—views
it finds offensive.

One notes with chagrin, as one has often noted, that the
feminist paradise of Sweden is among the most tolerant of sex crimes committed
by Muslim men against Swedish women and that girl power reigns in Germany and
Norway, places where Muslim men who rape women are more likely to be greeted with
multicultural sensitivity than with prison time or expulsion.

If the NECSS were half as upset over the way women are
routinely treated in the woman-run feminist paradises in Europe we would find
their umbrage easier to swallow.

In truth, the group can invite or disinvite anyone it wants.
But it is also clear that many forces in the culture will be more than happy to
shut up and to shut down Dawkins and his ilk.

Finally, Dawkins summarized his view of the incident:

Dawkins
later responded to his “de-platforming” of the NECSS conference: “De-platformed
for tweeting an irrelevant joke song? Ah well, ‘Always look on the bright side
of life.’ Incidentally, would Monty Python have been de-platformed for that?
No, don’t be silly, Life of Brian was only satirising Christianity.”

Apparently, Dawkins, who has made a second career out of
defaming religion, has just discovered that contemporary
ideology is far worse than Christianity. Ideologues cannot even take a joke.

Naturally, I always try to avoid posting offending and
offensive videos, but this time, in order to allow everyone to draw their own
conclusions, I will post it. (Thanks to S.M. for sending it along.)

Thursday, January 28, 2016

With everyone bowing and scraping to the newly legitimized
Iranian regime, and with the Vatican covering up slightly immodest art work out
of respect the delicate sensibilities of the Iranian prime minister, it’s good
to see one nation stand tall for civilized values.

That nation would be: France!

France’s president refused to submit to Iranian cultural
imperatives. Faced with a choice between wine or Islam and France chose wine. Lunch between the presidents of France and Iran was cancelled... over wine.

Usually it takes a little time before the curse of being Time
Magazine Person of the Year takes hold. Amazingly, Angela Merkel’s downfall
began on New Year’s Eve in Cologne. Then the demons she had unleashed by her
open-hearted welcoming of refugees rose up to attack young German women who
were out for the evening to celebrate the New Year.

Merkel believed that she was being kind-hearted and
welcoming. She even adopted a variant on the Obama administration policy
of “Yes, we can.” Now she looks to go down in history as the Chancellor who
destroyed Germany.

Apparently, Merkel and her supporters believed that
welcoming Muslim refugees was their Christian duty. They were willing to turn
the other cheek to the predations of the young males they allowed to molest
their daughters, but now they seem to have run out of cheeks.

One notes that Merkel is a conservative politician. The more
liberal and social elements in Germany have been cheering her on, but the
policy is hers.

Now, the situation is so bad that the highly sober Economistis beginning to be alarmed. It
is beginning to see that Europe’s future is anything but bright. Because, the
continent has just woken up to the fact that what happened in Cologne has been
happening in other European countries, especially in those that are run by
left-leaning and feminist politicians.

It writes:

The
new-year horrors of Cologne, when hundreds of women were sexually assaulted by
marauding groups of men, many of them Muslim asylum-seekers, focused minds on
cultural differences. But bringing refugees into the workforce, the main engine
of integration, represents at least as big a challenge. The assumption that
Germany’s tight labour market was tailor-made for job-hungry migrants has given
way to the grim realisation that most are an ill fit for an economy mainly
seeking highly skilled workers. The head of one business group reckons almost
80% of refugees have next to no skills at all.

The
Economist nicely calls it a challenge, but the more important point
is that these migrants are anything but “job-hungry.” Having “next to no skills
at all,” being dysfunctional and ineffectual males, they cover up their
inadequacy by preying on German women. With no skills they seem to have only one way to proclaim their machismo. The word manhood would be a
distortion.

Evidently, Merkel did not consider the consequences of her
actions. And she might still not have considered them fully. She was occupying the moral high ground and must have been surprised to see the
fallout from her policy.

Her legacy is collapsing:

Such
schemes show how far Germany has travelled since its “welcome culture” lifted
European liberals’ hearts last summer. Back then Mrs Merkel’s model presented
an inspiring alternative to the small-minded xenophobia of leaders like
Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Now, after the chaos and trauma of the past six months,
Mr Orban feels vindicated and the chancellor looks increasingly isolated.
Germany has tried to lead in Europe, but others will not follow. To Mrs
Merkel’s immense frustration, other EU countries agree to policies like
relocation and then ignore them. While German officials try to knit together
the geopolitics of the crisis, from Iraq to Turkey and Russia, most other countries
would prefer it simply to go away. As for the European Commission, which
sometimes looks like the chancellor’s last ally, it has gamely advanced common
policies but is too weak to enforce them. “The European dream is vanishing,”
sighs one of its senior officials.

As it happens, the woman-friendly policies of places like
Germany, Sweden and Denmark have deprived women of their basic liberties.
Anyone who disagrees is denounced as racist and told to shut up. Now, in
Cologne, with Carnival approaching, authorities have set up safe zones where
young women might feel safe from depraved Muslim refugees.

Now Europeans have also discovered the risks of allowing
asylum seekers, as they are called, share swimming pools with Europeans. The
only way to protect women in the best country in the world is to ban Muslim men
from public swimming pools.

The German town of Bornheim, 19 miles south of
Cologne, temporarily banned male asylum seekers from its pool this month after
receiving complaints of sexual harassment.

Last week, the historic baths Johannisbad baths
in Zwickau, Saxony banned all migrants after male asylum seekers had been
caught masturbating in a hot tub and sexually assaulting women.

The news from Sweden is no different:

Eriksdalsbadet, which is the biggest aquatics
centre in Stockholm, has previously reported a spike in sexual assaults –
mainly incidents involving boys and young men groping women. As a result,
Stockholm police will now have uniformed police regularly patrolling the
swimming centre, and the pool’s hot tubs are now segregated by sex.

And from Belgium:

It comes as a Belgian mayor announced that he
would propose banning male refugees from a swimming pool for a month on Monday
after complaints from female bathers.

The
teenager told police that she was attacked in central Sønderborg on Wednesday
at around 10pm by a dark-skinned English-speaking man. She said the man knocked
her to the ground and then unbuttoned her pants and attempted to undress
her.

The
girl was able to save herself from further assault by using pepper spray on the
attacker, but now she may be the one who ends up in legal trouble.

“It is
illegal to possess and use pepper spray, so she will likely be charged for
that,” local police spokesman Knud Kirsten told TV Syd.

The Danish paper also notes that the local police have been
covering up the number of rapes:

Denmark
recorded an average of 395 rape cases every year up to 2014. But an
investigation by the Ministry of Justice has revealed the actual number to be
closer to 1,100 annually, Metroxpress reported on Thursday.

The
majority of the ‘missing’ reports were hidden in police statistics by giving
them investigation numbers that did not classify them as rape cases. A number
of police departments confirmed to Metroxpress that this was standard practice
in cases where there was doubt as to whether a rape had actually occurred.

Recently, Denmark decided that it needed to get a bit tough
on asylum seekers. It passed a law that allowed officials to confiscate the
jewelry and other valuables of asylum seekers. Naturally, defenders of human
rights were in an uproar about these racist policies. One notes with chagrin
that these defenders of human rights do not care about the victims of the
sexual predators who are flooding these countries.

In Sweden, the central train station of Stockholm has been
taken over by marauding bands of Moroccan youths who prey on Swedish women. Keep
in mind that Sweden is a feminist paradise where men take parental leave and
where boys are taught that they must pee sitting down.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Before the first ballot has been cast Donald Trump has
declared himself the victor. He is the man in charge. As he sees it, being the
man in charge means telling other people what to do, how to run their
businesses.

Now, he has taken on the man who created Fox News, Roger
Ailes. One suspects that Trump was just getting tired of kicking around
politicians. It was just too easy to pound Jeb Bush. In the world of reality television, Trump is a master. No
candidate compares when it comes to occupying space on television. Trump has
barely spent any money advertising, but all the television networks report his
every word. They fall all over themselves to give him air time. After all,
Trump means high ratings, and who doesn’t want higher ratings?

If Trump was tired of squabbles and “squirmishes” with mere
politicians, why not go after the king of television news, the impresario who
made Fox News into a titan. If you want to be the king, you must replace the
king, and when it comes to reality television qua news the king is Roger Ailes.

Better yet, when a Republican attacks Fox news it looks like
a Sister Souljah moment. Any Republican can trash MSNBC, with impunity. It
fires up the base, as they say. But, for a Republican or a would-be Republican
to attack Fox News, that takes courage. It takes fortitude and it appeals to
those who think that Fox News is the Inferno and that Roger Ailes is Lucifer.

Of course, people who hold to New York values hate Fox News.
They consider it to be the root of all evil… or at least the evil that has not
been caused by the Tea Party and George W. Bush.

By dissing Fox News, and refusing, for now, to show up for
the Thursday debate, Trump is dominating the news cycle and showing off his New
York values.

One must point out that the general opinion, from
commentators on the left and the right was that the Fox journalists did an
excellent job, took a fair and balanced approach, in the first debate.
Obviously, DT did not think so. He took serious exception to the process and
especially to one Megyn Kelly.

Go back to the beginning. People forget the opening salvo of
the first debate. The moderators asked the assembled candidates to raise their
hands to show that they would support the Republican nominee, no matter who. All but one did.

It was serious television drama. Was Ailes behind it? I
suspect that he was. Was he trying to humiliate Donald Trump? I suspect that he
was.

Truth be told, Trump still came out on top. His supporters
loved him more than they had before, if that is possible, and his detractors
softened their attitude. It looked like he could handle tough questions and
retain his composure under fire. Future debates seemed to prove the point.
Trump may not be a professional debater, but he did better than hold his own.

Still, Trump was seriously piqued. But, he did not go after
Ailes directly. Why attack the king when you can attack someone he cares about,
his franchise, his greatest creation, Megyn Kelly. Increasingly, Kelly looks
like the face of Fox News and the future of Fox News.

As it happens, Kelly has become a media darling. She has
received fawning cover profiles in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and
Vanity Fair. For people with New York values, it doesn’t get much better than
that. Megyn Kelly is becoming what is called in another context, a crossover
talent. She is working on a conservative channel, but has become a darling of
the liberal media. Not because she is a liberal—she is far more conservative
than liberal—but because she is just as adept at confronting and debating
conservatives. She is always fair and balanced….

Anyway, Trump was sorely offended at the questions that
Kelly asked him at the first debate. He responded her in personal and vulgar terms. Since Kelly asked Trump about the
way he speaks about women, his attacks on her have simply proved her right.

In the meantime, Trump’s fan base does not care. It seems to
believe that speaking ill of women is the antidote to feminism. It isn’t, but
who cares?

So, Trump has been riding high in the polls. Debates in
which he participates have spiked television ratings and brought in
considerable advertising dollars. So, why not use his power to abuse Megyn
Kelly and to push around Roger Ailes. Clearly, that would make him the king of
all reality media… don’t you think?

Trump might have been thinking this way. He might not have
been. He has been running a campaign on his instincts, and, for now, his instincts
have been much better than some of us imagined.

One suspects that Trump felt humiliated in the first Fox
debate. And he must have felt that Ailes did it on purpose. Now, he is looking
for payback. If it feels thin-skinned, that’s because it is. If it feels like
throwing one’s weight around, trying to look strong when you are feeling
weakened, that’s because it is. It might not be the most civilized way to save
face, but many people would do the same. They hurt his feelings; now he is going to make them pay... in the most literal sense.

Anyway, the Washington Post has reprinted Kelly’s remarks. I
quote them for your edification:

Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you
is you speak your mind and you don't use a politician's filter. However, that
is not without its downsides, in particular, when it comes to
women. You've called women you don't like 'fat pigs,' 'dogs,' 'slobs' and
'disgusting animals.' ...

Your Twitter account has several disparaging
comments about women's looks. You once told a a pretty picture to see her
on her knees.

Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man
we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary
Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the
war on women?"

One notes that Trump interrupted the question to point out
that he had only said those things about Rosie O’Donnell. His fans cheered
heartily. To that Kelly pointed out that he was wrong. The Washington Post
checked the facts and said that Kelly was correct. To Trump supporters, it did
not matter.

And Kelly asked this, which echoes the point that Trump
first made in 1999 about New York values:

Mr. Trump, in 1999, you said you were, quote, 'very
pro-choice.' Even supporting partial-birth abortion. You favored an assault
weapons ban as well. In 2004, you said in most cases you identified as a
Democrat. Even in this campaign, your critics say you often sound more like a
Democrat than a Republican, calling several of your opponents on the stage
things like 'clowns' and 'puppets.' When did you actually become a Republican?

It’s a fair question, because
Trump has been touting his conversion to Republicanism. He has made it sound
like he converted when he was struck by lightning on the road to Damascus. This
seems sufficient for many evangelical voters, who are now flocking to Trump because
of a text they found in 2 Corinthians.

The Post adds that the other candidates
also received pointed and tough questions, questions designed to address their
weaknesses.

Anyway, Donald has been feuding
with Kelly ever since. It does not seem very dignified to me, but it does seem
to have been working.

So well that Trump recently
decided to up the game with his true opponent, Ailes, by demanding that Megyn
Kelly be excluded from the upcoming Fox debate. He accused her of being unfair
and biased against him and he said that if she was there, he would absent
himself. He knew that his presence would mean big ratings and more advertising
revenue. Why not leverage his power to kick around Roger Ailes?

To be clear, there is no way on
earth that any news organization can possibly accede to such a demand. To do so
would discredit it immediately. It would become, if I may use this harsh
language, Trump’s bitch.

Perhaps Trump was just playing
chicken with Fox News. Perhaps he had intended to make his point and then to
show up. After all, the debates have been a boon to him. But then, Ailes fired back at him yesterday afternoon, through a spokesman, in distinctly
unflattering language:

We learned from a secret back channel that the
Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet
with him if he becomes president—a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his
own secret plan to replace the cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should
even go to those meetings.

Apparently, this was one insult
too many. No one could be allowed to ridicule the Donald and to get away with
it. Trump folded his cards and walked away from the debate. For now, at least.

Obviously, he is opening himself
up to charges of chickening out. He is opening himself to charges that he is
afraid to face a woman. But he believes that he is looking tough and his
supporters might very well be contented with that. Clearly, Ailes or Kelly or
both have gotten under his skin. How will it work out in the end? We do not
know. Underestimating Donald Trump has not been a very winning strategy lately.

Obviously, Trump’s opponents are
trying to seize the initiative by suggesting that Trump is not man enough to
deal with Megyn Kelly. Ted Cruz invited Trump to a one-on-one, mano-a-mano
debate, moderated by whomever he wishes. And someone created a new hashtag:
#DonaldDuck.

When Trump withdrew from the
debate, a Fox spokesperson issued this statement:

Now, Gabriel Sherman reports in New York Magazine that the
powers at Fox are very upset and that the conflict with Trump is exposing divisions within
the organization… especially between those who support Megyn Kelly and those
who resent her being the new face of the network.

Trump
advisers are privately telling people that he will only deal with Rupert
Murdoch to resolve the dispute. Having Murdoch dragged into the mess could be a
serious problem for Ailes. The CEO earned Murdoch's
trust because Fox generates $1 billion in profit, but also because he
was always in control. But in recent months Murdoch has been attending news
meetings at Fox in the wake of a health scare that forced Ailes to take an
extended leave of absence. Succession planning at Fox is very much on
Murdoch's agenda. If Ailes loses his grip on the Trump situation —
and right now it looks like he is — Murdoch will have another reason to
worry about the stability of his most valuable asset.